Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Monday August 04, 2008 @10:06AM
from the people-who-need-to-invest-in-decaf dept.

Knuckles writes "Austrian newspaper Der Standard continues its recent series of in-depth interviews with free software developers. This time they sat down with Novell's Vice President of Developer Platform, Miguel de Icaza of Gnome and Mono fame. The interview was conducted at GUADEC (GNOME Users' And Developers' European Conference).
Miguel talks mainly about Mono 2.0 and .Net 3.5 compatibility, enhancing the collaboration with Microsoft over Silverlight ('Moonlight' in Mono), and the larger political situation of Mono and Moonlight. When the interviewer asks whether Moonlight is only validating Silverlight on the web, Miguel gives a quite detailed answer that includes a possibly well-deserved swipe at Mozilla ..."

He makes good points about Mozilla, and Flash and stuff. But that doesn't mean we want to use MS trash. If it is 100% free, and patent free as well (does MS support extend to releasing all relevant patents for anyone to use, or whatever how you say it?), then sure use it if you want.

Personally, I don't know why the Mozilla folks don't run with XUL some more.

Personally though, I have Flash and Java turned off by default, I'm not about to have Silverlight (or Moonlight) enabled by default.

The only reason I usually turn off Flash on sites other then some game sites or YouTube, is because the Linux Flash player is just so crappy. I have a decent enough/etc/hosts file that blocks 98% of the ads, but if I leave Flash on, Firefox's CPU shoots to 80% just displaying a banner ad. Thankfully, I downgraded to an older version and it doesn't do it as much.

The only reason I usually turn off Flash on sites other then some game sites or YouTube, is because the Linux Flash player is just so crappy. I have a decent enough/etc/hosts file that blocks 98% of the ads, but if I leave Flash on, Firefox's CPU shoots to 80% just displaying a banner ad. Thankfully, I downgraded to an older version and it doesn't do it as much.

Ehm, this is not the linux flash player as such, it's the flash player, period. I get the exact same problem on some sites in windows. Also downgrading flash is a seriously stupid thing to do right now, as the recent vulnerability they discovered leaves you wide open to attack. (and it has been spotted in the wild, though generally targeted at windows)

Adobe did this years ago with PDF, and didn't take long to do so for SWF once they bought Macromedia. They want everyone using their formats, and to then compete based on the quality and branding of their authoring tools. It's a good business case in my eyes -- make the pie bigger by opening the spec but keep most of the pie yourself by making the best-known implementation that the most people know how to use.

To compare that with anything Microsoft has ever done, the executable format for Windows is the best example. To get more programmers targeting Windows, allowing more compiler makers into the market easily was a must. If you can only compile programs using the OS vendor's compiler, that feels very much like lock-in. By getting competing compiler and assembler products supporting their OS quickly made it easier for developers to decide to target the platform in its early days.

OOXML, albeit a contentious, oversized, and and only partially specified format, is an example of Microsoft trying to do some of the same things. They're trying to get people who believe in open, competitive file formats to use a format they have a competitive advantage in producing and editing. With Microsoft's past (and some of the gotchas in the spec itself), it's easy to see how that advantage could be kept through much chicanery.

However, the Adobe's got a pretty good record of allowing anyone to come along and make use of the Photoshop save format, the PDF publishing format (which is itself based on PostScript), and allowing JavaScript and ActionScript (both based on the ECMAScript standard, after all (which is based on earlier versions of JavaScript)) to interact cleanly. Now that SWF as a spec is published, it's difficult for honest people working with Microsoft technology to be judgmental about openness.

PostScript is the best example. Adobe wrote the first standard and implementation. They published a later version of the spec before they had an implementation and were beaten to market by a competitor. I don't know what, if any, market share Adobe still has for PostScript implementations (RIPs), but they certainly get a lot of money from the desktop publishing market that releasing PostScript helped to create.

Actually, although the Flash IDE is closed-source and proprietary, the SWF file format is now a published specification which others are free to implement.

I don't think the situation isn't quite that rosy. Although SWF is an open format, there are lots and lots of other bits and pieces that you need, such as the library of GUI widgets, and the various audio and video codecs. Those are all proprietary. (Some, e.g., mp3, are only proprietary because someone else owns a patent. However, Adobe hasn't bothered

In creating.NET, Microsoft correctly recognized a problem they had: their existing cross-language development tools such as COM had a high learning curve and were clunky to use. Their offerings for developing an application were C, C++, or Visual Basic. Working with these components and making them inter-operate highlighted the desire for a powerful, "real" object oriented, garbage collecting, managed runtime. Say what you want about Microsoft's intentions,.NET is a step in the right direction for them. And if Linux developers feel the features it exposes are better to work with in some cases than Java (I happen to agree with that), there's no shame in adopting them.

Yes, potential patent issues make it so there is some risk involved. If MS is smart they'd realize that would severely hurt their image. On the other hand, do they really make legal decisions without considering their own potential problems, like running afowl of antitrust law, or being seen as more monopolistic than they are seen as today? Nevermind that being a monopoly would make them liable to lose billions of dollars, but also, they have an image problem already, and they probably don't want to make it worse.

But let's ignore that patents, or what company.NET comes from. The technology is pretty solid. It was the right thing to do to go beyond their existing technologies like COM. It's a pretty good answer to Java and addresses some of its shortcomings well. It also has more than one supported language. They say that pretty soon, it'll have inbuilt Python and Ruby too.

In creating Silverlight, MS recognized another area that could use some work: namely, flash sucks. It looks pretty doubtful that we'll see it adopted at this point, but if it does, it'll be good that Moonlight will have source code available. Yes, there are free/open projects that do Flash today, and are working on reverse-engineering, but you just know that they'll come out with more changes next week. If Moonlight is working with MS to provide real inter-operability, I think that's a good thing.

Mono v Java is no longer a contest, Java is Free and Mono is a patent minefield laid by a convicted monopolist.

Flash v Silverlight isn't as black and white but there are Free plugins for Flash in active development and the spec is open. Meanwhile Silverlight is a patent minefield laid by a convicted monopolist. In every way that Adobe is difficult to work with Microosft is worse.

Looks like Miguel still pimping a marriage with Microsoft. Dude, she likes country and he likes rock-n-roll! Seafood vs. burger and fries. He's frugal, forward looking and she spends money like a drunken sailor! More importantly he just wants some freedom and she wants to tie him down. Let it go!

Lord knows there's certainly stuff to criticize about de Icaza, but this isn't really one of them.

"I hope so" refers to Mono becoming the officially sanctioned.Net standard for Linux -- not that de Icaza hopes Microsoft would open up.Net. If you actually read the very next question in the article (I must be new here...), you'd have seen where de Icaza said:

In the meantime - I really don't think they are going to open source.Net.

-- they are talking about the possibility of Microsoft pulling a Sun/Java thing, and if the open-source effort would have been wasted as a result. The answer is "no, but I don't think they would open-source it anyways".

NFSOpenOfficeSolarisJavaVirtualBoxSun Grid Engineetc.NET is a copy of Java, which Microsoft created because Java was cross platform. Why would they ever open.NET, when the goal of.NET was to create a non-portable clone of Java?

Yes, the project was started as such. Calling it a "copy" is inaccurate.

No, it isn't..Net was started because Microsoft couldn't build on Java due to Sun v. Microsoft.

Java aims for Java-the-language penetration above all; Jython and JRuby are tolerated, but aren't anything close to first-class citizens.

You're drinking the anti-Java kool-aid a little too much. The Java Virtual Machine has always been cross-language capable. It was cool in the early days of Java for language developers to target Java bytecode with their compilers.

Jython and JRuby are more than tolerated. Their development is primarily funded by Sun, and the NetBeans IDE has garnered a lot of attention for being one of the best Ruby on Rails ID

When you put it into the context of the history of Java, it is not all that far fetched.

Yes it is. Sun has a track record of working closely with Free Software projects for quite a few years now. You almost expect Sun to release the code to major projects now (not "expect" as in thinking they owe it, but "expect" as in "I wouldn't be surprised if..."), as they've done with OpenOffice, ZFS, and even Solaris.

Microsoft released some fonts once, then later changed their minds.

I would be infinitely more surprised in Microsoft opening anything interesting than I would in Sun doing the same.

If you read the interview it sounds hopelessly optimistic and naive to imagine that you could implement a multimedia framework compatible with Silverlight as a free software alternative to Flash, that you could have a.NET and C# implementation compatible with Microsoft's, that you could write desktop applications in C#... until you remember that Miguel and his team have an awesome track record of doing all these things.

Awesome track record? I'm sorry, I must be living in an alternate reality. So MONO is now being used interchangeably on Linux and Microsoft platforms like Java is? Like he planned all along? So MONO has gained mass adoption and mass acceptance and has been embraced by Microsoft and they are now allowing them to.NET conferences where they were continually denying them from showing?

Wow. This new reality you live in smells vaguely of that new fragrance... DeNial. You and Migual must shop at the same store.

I meant track record in terms of technical achievement, not marketing. Perhaps the number of third-party.NET apps that officially run on Linux is pretty small; it's hard to get numbers for these things (especially for in-house work which is much more than half of all development).

I've got to say this is my issue with the 'reimplement MS tech' - what else could you have done with all those resources that a) truly innovated, b) did something open and free, c) did something better.

People do go on about this for other OSS projects - why make another CD Burner when you could contribute to an existing project. I think the consensus is that people create OSS projects for the "glory", you don't get quite the same amount of kudos for being 'just another contributer'. I'm not sure if Miguel f

-Yeah, Miguel and Co. wasted all that time working on Mono that they could have used on something truly innovative, open and free, like wasting his time making the 773rd different distro of the exact same Linux operating system every other distro is making, but this one has a BROWN colored desktop theme, right?

Me thinks he barketh up the wrong tree.

-In the real world, very few people are going to stop using M$ because Linux isn't capable of working with them. People will stop using Linux if it can't be made

They have an awesome track record of coming up short. Like the winforms support that is still coming up short! He himself stated in the interview that moonlight will be like a "light version" of silverlight. So us linux desktop users are supposed to remain first-class citizens on the web by using a second rate, braindamaged implementation of a new, unproven web technology by Microsoft of all places? Hah!

It reminds me the Roman empire Caesar Nero who had lots of enemies. He decided to invite all his enemies to great theatre performance. Nero's plan was to put on a production so beautiful that he would make his enemies love him.

Mmmh, x86 the ISA isn't totally under the control of Intel, as shown by the x86-64 extension that AMD made and that Intel was forced to take.

That could equally happen here, except that Mono will never get the marketshare (=leverage) to make it happen, and ironically part of the reason for that has got to be the staggeringly closed-minded bleatings of the rabid Linux fanboy crowd.

MDI is clearly a very good programmer, but he hasn't shown that his viewpoint about Microsoft dumb is reasonable..

I love Gnome and I understand Mono is a somewhat simpler (than C++) way to build programs for it, but is it really necessary?

Of course not. If Python's not to your liking, check out Vala [gnome.org], which is a programming language influenced by C# and designed for Gtk+. Kinda like a free software "embrance, extend", only done properly and without the traditionally implied ", extinguish".

Yuck because it's not needed (there are other ways to build rich internet applications and using a semi-proprietary solution is not the way to foster development of an open one), not particularly elegant (Flash is much worse, but that's not the point here) and also because Microsoft controls it and is free to steer it any way they please (and that, probably, won't please me).

I was more thinking about Ajax or the clever use of JavaScript to emulate desktop applications. Of course, it narrows the definition of "rich" (which is not well defined, anyway) as probably not to include audio or video and not much animation (mainly because animation tools for JavaScript are severely lacking and most JavaScript implementations also suck a lot).

The price you quote is for a computer. A commodity one. Still, the burden of being Windows-friendly is felt in just about every computer - they all use more or less the same processors, the same memory architecture, the same old IO architecture of an IBM PC 5150. And only recently 64-bit and multi-cpu computers started to become mainstream. There is competition, but only to make it cheaper and faster. There is none to make it evolve because evolving out of Windows-frie

1. One has to give some credit to Miguel for thinking big and at least attempting to do it. The way he's doing it is perilous and I can see why some in the OSS crowd fault the guy. The odds are working against him. Strongly so.

2. He's convinced Novell this is something to spend/make money with. He's got a 40-person head count and it is totally unclear to me how Novell ***makes money**** on this to support such a large dev team. If they turned themselves into a 40-person contract dev group, I don't see customers clamoring for a dual-platform solution.

Even if his projects are widely adopted, there's no way I can see that Novell can make money at it. Which still makes Novell operating in run-off mode until the last netware(?) customer quits.

I have no problem with MS trying to make money of Silverlight, OOXML or any of their proprietary standards, I simply want the option to choose not to use them. I also would like to see better informed decisions by major players on which standards to use.

My belief is that eventually people will choose truly open standards because, fundamentally, they are better (this is my personal viewpoint, feel free to differ and debate).

As this blog post explains, while the current software patent situation exists, Mono is an unacceptable risk.

What makes Mono an 'unacceptable risk' but allows Wine to become one of the most often praised open source projects on Slashdot?

Wine can be used to run those few windows apps for which you do not have no linux replacement, under linux. Mono is a development environment which could be used for just about anything... what if gnome, or some important gnome apps, got ported to Mono, and the day after Microsoft comes up with the bill?.. or with usage restrictions of some kind... Please read the link in the parent post, before replying... Here it is again:

People develop for Mono and many want it to become a standard part of GNU/Linux distributions. Wine is generally used as a last resort to run non-native applications, and has always been considered optional (well, except by Lindows/Linspire - does anyone use that any more?)

You develop for Mono because applications can run under it as fully integrated with the environment they run upon. You don't develop for Wine because your applications will look utterly stupid and feel completely unintegrated on every platform except Windows.

If Wine is a roaring success, and Microsoft brings the hammer down on it, the only people who suffer are commercial entities who refuse to develop GNU/Linux-native applications, and the occasional user who cannot find a free alternative to their favoured proprietary app.

If Mono is a roaring success, large swathes of the open source spectrum will become reliant upon it. If Microsoft brings the hammer down, it will no longer be possible to run the majority of free and open source applications on a free and open source operating system.

Because no one (sensible) is advocating using WINE for new cross-platform development. WINE is a legacy support tool. People are advocating developing new applications with Mono. If people started advocating using WINE as a toolkit for new development on *NIX then there would almost certainly be similar complaints. If there are patent issues with WINE and Microsoft kills it, then people lose legacy app support. If there are patent issues with Mono and Microsoft kills it then people lose new apps. If people write new apps targeting WINE then they expose themselves to the same potential risk (less so, because most of WINE implements APIs that are almost certainly not covered by patents), and so no one is suggesting adopting WINE as a framework for new developing new parts of GNOME.

The entire point of the article is that Mono should not be integrated into GNOME. Exactly the same argument could be made for not integrating WINE into GNOME, but since no one is advocating doing this, no one feels the need to post things arguing against it.

I personally do not want to build my applications on Javascript. I think that its a) slow b) ugly and c) spaghetti code, right?

He definitely has a point with A. and some with B. (though it's a matter of opinion), but C. is just FUD. He obviously doesn't understand JavaScript (not the DOM, JavaScript is not just the DOM). JavaScript can produce very elegant code if you know what you're doing. I'm sure you can get some pretty nasty C# spaghetti code too (though it may not be as likely). I doubt that any language will replace JavaScript any time soon. All the different browsers would have to support whatever replaces it almost simultaneously. Flash is getting close, but it seems the community is treating Silverlight as a "me too" offering from MS./rant

His comments about Mozilla are pretty interesting. I appreciate the work on Mono that they've been doing, but it's still strange to be at the mercy of MS whenever they make a change to their setup. That alone will leave Mono/Moonlight at least one step behind and could be used as an argument for only using Windows.

I'd go out on a limb and say there is no language where you couldn't make "spaghetti code". For the record, yes, C# has goto and labels. From MSDN itself: (modded slightly cause I hate open brackets on a line by themselves.)

Javascript has a low barrier to entry, so there's a lot of crap code (and crap coders). The same is true of VB and PHP. But you can do a lot of really elegant things in JavaScipt (not true of php or vb). Builtin regexp, first class functions, closures, extend classes at runtime... It can be procedural, it can be functional, it can be OO.

Oh, and Flash uses ActionScript which is... JavaScript. And Silerlight presumably could use JScript.Net.

JavaScript is not slow. Most implementations of JavaScript are fairly slow because (like Ruby) they use direct AST execution, which is very slow. This is done deliberately, because startup time is more important than execution speed for most scripts on the web. The new WebKit JavaScript has a bytecode interpreter, which is quite fast (about as fast as most Smalltalk implementations).

Semantically, JavaScript is very close to Self, and implementations of Self were running at about 50% of the speed of the same algorithm implemented in C++ back in the '90s. These days we'd probably call that 'fast'.

JavaScript has a lot of advantages. It's got a fairly nice Self/Io style object model, first-class closures, and a huge number of people who know it. Supporting JavaScript's object model was one of the design goals for the Etoile Objective-C runtime library, and I hope to have it supported as a first-class development language by Etoile 0.6 (I wrote a Smalltalk JIT that uses the same object model as Objective-C for 0.4 and a lot of the code can be reused to support JavaScript).

Apart from Migue De Icaza. He'd probably love it if Gnome were to be rewritten in Mono.

I am actually not a fan of rewriting software that works. Rewriting is not a decision that must be taken lightly, you introduce regressions, you might drop features, a lot of knowledge embedded in the small details is lost and so on.

But there are certain cases where rewriting is worth doing. I would like to see a few applications rewritten. I do not really want to "rewrite" the panel, but instead come up with new in

No one uses Mono in the fanboy-heavy businesses, such as web development, and the people that go toward Mono tend to be.NET Ninjas (since you have to know it well to deal with the quirks and stuff), so you won't see them on discussion forums all that much.

At the last place I worked (a.NET shop), it was pretty scary how many of our competitors were using Mono for their back end, to the point we considered switching too (didn't from lack of ressources)..NET stuff sells well to gullible CEOs, and.NET stuff

Sorry, it isn't flame bait. To some it may be, but this is my honest opinion.

Microsoft's actions on OOXML, alone, show that it can not be trusted to play fair. I see no rational reason why the open source movement should validate *any* of their technology without a clear and unambiguous free and open license and a durable specification that does not become a never ending game of catch up.

Wow, now he wants to re-implement the Gnome Panel, file manager and Evolution in Moonlight. Has he finished implementing them in Mono already? This is kinda funny -- every time Microsoft comes up with some new technology, Miguel scrambles to write a clone of it, then goes on to re-implement Gnome in that. Reimplementing stuff is so much fun [jwz.org] anyway! If MS wants to halt all actual progress in Gnome, all have to do is churn out new hype technologies every 12 months or so.

The problem with 3.5 is, that it includes 3.0 where they basically dumped a bunch of libraries that are not really part.Net

You meant MS changed the whole definition of what is part of.net to include stuff not covered by OSP or that are not portable? Shocker.

Also one thing that is very unique: Microsoft is going to be distributing an add-on to Moonlight called the "media pack" And that add-on contains all the media codecs that Silverlight uses, so it contains the MP3 decoder, the VC1 decoder, WMV and all that stuff. We are going to provide Moonlight and they are adding the codec parts - and this is going to be totally legal, it's something that they are actually encouraging - that's pretty sweet

Moonlight is going to require a proprietary addon in order to actually interoperate with silverlight, pretty sweet.

For every distribution, also x86, x86_64 and PowerPC. In fact we are going to provide binaries for BSDs, for Solaris - both on SPARC and Intel.

Same old, you'll have to download them from MS and only MS, and SLED will be the only distro one able to ship them. Oh, it looks like Icaza actually confirms so in page 2.

I hope so. It might end up that at some point Microsoft just open ups.NET

hahahahahha

you get C#, you get a DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime), you get a fantastic graphics engine with a fantastic animation framework, you get video, you get audio, multi-language compatibility and so on and so forth. And I get a JITted language also, and a static language with dynamic features that beats Javascript out of the water.

As a hacker you get Microsoft, Microsoft, compatibility to Microsoft languages, and Microsoft. And beating javascript with Microsoft.

As websites start using Silverlight we don't want Linux to be in a position where you can't access those websites. Also we thought Silverlight will be important enough and have enough market share just because it is Microsoft doing it

Specially after the free, false advert of 'silverlight works in Linux' thanks to moonlight.

I mean - how many people outside of the technology world really know about Linux at the moment.

Typical MS fanboyism from Icaza

And even the Mozilla guys - the keynote we had here was done on a mac, every single Mozilla developer uses a Mac.

Diverting attention are we?

And it's funny, they constantly attack Silverlight, they constantly attack Flash and then all of them use proprietary operating systems, they don't seem to have a problem doing it. And then they had the Guiness record thing for Firefox 3 and you went to the website and it had a flash map to show where people are downloading - so there definitely is a double standard here.

Icaza here's the deal: AT least FLASH is NOT FREAKING MICROSOFT! Don't you get it? call it a double standard if you want, just missing all the previous record of Microsoft's anticompetitive actions and the clear intent to take over the world with.net and how Mono makes Linux threated by it... It is getting ridiculous.

And that's after all their claiming that you can do everything in AJAX - so they definitely don't "walk the walk".

Mozilla is evil therefore we'll help poisoning the web with Silverlight, fuck open standards.

The business side explanation is that we want to make sure that Linux remains a first class citizen on the web. As websites start using Silverlight we don't want Linux to be in a position where you can't access those websites. Also we thought Silverlight will be important enough and have enough market share just because it is Microsoft doing it.

Replacing the open-systems UNIX API with the Microsoft controlled.NET API is awfully reminiscent of how IBM made OS/2 such a popular desktop.

Did we not just have an article [slashdot.org] in which Microsoft claimed OSS were copying all their ideas and not innovating? We all scoffed and had a good ol' laugh at Microsoft, how silly they are to see OSS in that light!

And now it seems the future of the web is to try implementing their standards. Miguel even admits that it isn't open enough for him to implement all of it. Talk about innovation, or lack thereof.

What makes Miquel think that he and mono is so special to Microsoft? If you look at Microsofts history everyone who have tried to cooperate has ended up with a knife in their back. The ones who compete with them have been left a smoldering piece of rubbel. The potential risks with mono is enormous since the one who control it is activly out to destroy linux despite its humble marketshare. Imagine if Linux wore to take a lot bigger marketshare? Does anyone think they would not panic and press the SCO-style l

I thought we'd all learned that supporting Microsoft technologies allows Microsoft to use those technologies against the competition and against the user. Look at what we have today with Windows Vista. It has 47 different programs that collect information about you and report that back to Microsoft. This is not a good thing. It is a violation of your privacy. It is a terrible precedent.

Microsoft uses their techology to trap you into their operating system and thus traps you into buying their future pro

MS has made it clear that they want to kill OSS. So Miguel decides to make an OSS alternative to Silverlight with MS's help, unfortunately, MS will add in proprietary features once this halfway kills flash, and the reference implantation won't be the OSS Moonlight, it will instead be MS's proprietary Silverlight.

Oh, right, because Moonlight won't be able to? What about the codec pack Microsoft will release for non-Windows operating systems, for x86, x86_64, and PowerPC alike, specifically and solely for Moonlight?

Why is it that the trolls crawl out from under the bridge whenever Mono comes up?

I don't disagree that Microsoft has given them food, but Mono is a good thing, of only because Java isn't going to cut it for a managed code environment in the future. Make something better, and we'll talk. Right now, the CLR does everything Java does and then some. Hell, it even supports Java

To be fair, Ogg Theora sucks. I can see why they wouldn't really want to use it. (Don't get me wrong--Ogg Vorbis is great, but Theora is pretty second-rate. Yes, I realize I just rhymed. Poet, didn't know it, etcetera.)

I use.Net and in some situations I prefer it over Java. I use Linux as well. I severely doubt I'll be using Silverlight any time soon, though, as I try to avoid using Flash where possible.

The only reasons.Net exists are because Microsoft needed an up-to-date language for developers who use Visual Studio, because Java was old and someone needed to give it a clean start, because Java takes a slightly different approach to C++ in some places (so C# can get migrating C++ developers) and because they wanted a

The only reasons.Net exists are because Microsoft needed an up-to-date language for developers who use Visual Studio, because Java was old and someone needed to give it a clean start, because Java takes a slightly different approach to C++ in some places (so C# can get migrating C++ developers) and because they wanted a real "write lots of languages to a single base and port anywhere" language.

Actually, the reason.NET exists is because Microsoft was prohibited after the Sun/MS lawsuit in 1997 from making

Java has a pretty slick dynamic dispatch of GUI events in the form of java.beans.EventHandler. Is this everything delegates do, maybe not. But it allows you to hook a named method of any active object instance into a menu, mouse action, or other GUI event. Maybe Sun doesn't promote its use beyond IDEs that handle Java Beans and Sun still wants you to use anonymous inner classes, but this facility is pretty powerful, I use it in my GUI programming, and it works just fine.

Java has a pretty slick dynamic dispatch of GUI events in the form of java.beans.EventHandler. Is this everything delegates do, maybe not. But it allows you to hook a named method of any active object instance into a menu, mouse action, or other GUI event. Maybe Sun doesn't promote its use beyond IDEs that handle Java Beans and Sun still wants you to use anonymous inner classes, but this facility is pretty powerful, I use it in my GUI programming, and it works just fine.

Good for you. I have still seen the work he has done to fragment the OSS community. He may have contributed a lot of code, but still works against many of the concepts of F/OSS. He seems to cuddle up to MS at every opportunity and frankly, I could care less if Gnome were to die. The code is already out and it can be forked (The POINT of F/OSS). He loves to control things and recreate the MS universe.